How to grep to make the list of all PHP classes from all the files?

Question

I'm trying to grep all the files containing the class names, in example:

$ grep -ER "(^| )class [^ ]*" .

Where I thought (^| ) would include either whitespace or newline , but it's showing all class words within the comments such as:

./includes/bootstrap.inc: *   The name of the class to check or load.

And the following example:

grep -ER "(^|\?abstract)class [^ ]*" .

actually doesn't include any abstract class files.

Basically I'm trying to do the regex such as:

1. New line or space.
2. Optional word abstract .
3. class name (word).
4. Space after it.
5. Any actual class name (word).

So the regex would react on the following lines:

  class Entity {
class Entity {
class NoFieldsException extends Exception {}
abstract class CacheArray implements ArrayAccess {

But not for these:

 * This class should be extended by systems that need to cache large amounts

---

Setting up the testing environment:

$ curl -o- http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.31.tar.gz | tar zxf - && cd drupal-7*
$ grep -ER "(^| )class [^ ]*" . | less
$ grep -ER "(^|\?abstract)class [^ ]*" . | wc -l
653 # But this doesn't include ./includes/bootstrap.inc:abstract class DrupalCacheArray

---

Example use cases:

• In case when Drupal CMS class registry is broken, the table needs to be rebuilt , so all available files containing classes needs to be imported into SQL table.

Answer 1

An alternative to my other answer is to allow PHP to handle it without actually executing the code by using the tokenizer . This way you should not have any of the negative side-effects of an incorrect regex since PHP is doing all the parsing.

test1.php:

<?php

$source = file_get_contents('test2.php');
$tokens = token_get_all($source);

foreach ($tokens as $token) {
    // 308 is for classes
    if ($token[0] == 308) {
        // $token[1] contains the actual class name
        echo $token[1] ."\n";
    }
}

test2.php:

  class Entity { }
class                                             Entity {
}
class NoFieldsException extends Exception {}
abstract
    class
             CacheArray implements ArrayAccess { }
// But not for these:

 /* This class should be extended by systems that need to cache large amounts */

Output:

Entity
Entity
NoFieldsException
Exception
CacheArray
ArrayAccess

Note, it may not be desirable to have Exception and ArrayAccess show up in here too since one is a native PHP class and the other is being implemented. If not, try doing a print_r($tokens); and playing around with it to get what you want. You could also add them all to an array and then do array_unique() to get the unique values.

Answer 2

As arkascha mentions, there are probably too many possibilities to have this done with regex, however given the examples you have, this should work for them:

/^(\s+)?(abstract\s+)?class\s+(\S+)/igm

See it in action: http://regex101.com/r/qM7iO0/4